MUSCLE WIZARDS VS LASER DINOSAURS: TURBO VAMPIRE EDITION

LISTEN UP, chumpheads. This is a game of HIGH-CALIBRE YELLING and HELLA COOL EXPLOSIONS and if you’re not a BAD ENOUGH DUDE, DUDETTE or NON-BINARY DUDE-ORIENTATED PERSON then THERE’S THE DOOR.

It’s inspired by Kung-Fu Hustle, Rifts, Traveller, Risus, Wushu, & Buckaroo Banzai. You and your team of EXTRAVAGANT DUDE-RELATED FOLK are gonna kick ass and take names.

[The title is BARELY RELEVANT to the game but I’m damned if I, the second designer, am going to change it. Look at it. So majestic.]

Character Creation

OKAY this is gonna be fun so STRAP IN. First things first: we need to make CHARACTERS. There's no GM in MWLD:TV; being a GM is BORING and for NERDS and we are all ACE DUDE-TYPE CREATURES. Every player has a character.

List four traits your character has. These can be anything:

* T-Rex With CYBORG ARMS
* President of the United States of KICKASS
* Bottomless Pockets
* “I studied this in Evil Genius College!”
* DISCO NIGHTMARE
* Just a swarm of raccoons in an overcoat
* Greatest Mind This Side of the Salt Flats
* Irresponsible Wizard Headmaster
* Get Out Of My Way, I’m A Cathedral
* Summon BEARSTORM
* [incoherent grunting noises]
* Racecar with a sassy AI
* Trunk full of guns
* My hands are WEAPONS
* My weapons are HANDS
* Etc.

Each of these gets a token. You also get two 'free-floating' tokens that aren't attached to any traits. Use whatever you want as tokens; we use bottle caps.

BOXOUT - This is going to get wacky as ALL HELL. If you don’t want to play a wacky game, then slap a theme on top of your traits: something like GRITTY COPS or MARTIAL ARTS MASTERS or PULP ADVENTURERS. Although, y’know, it’s still going to be wacky, if you don’t want to play a wacky game then Pathfinder is over THAT WAY pal, laters -

LISTEN. The world ain’t a NICE PLACE and you and your chums are gonna get BEAT UP SOME. Your character gets a four-box health track to handle this eventuality, the boxes are labelled: Deterred, Halted, Transformed, and Destroyed. Sketch them out on your sheet.

WAIT. Who ARE you, anyway? You need to know your character's name and what they want. Write these down. Read them aloud to the table; as a table, vote on who has the BEST NAME and the RADDEST MOTIVATION. Winners of both get an EXTRA floating token and a license to be UNBEARABLY SMUG.

Finally, draw your character. Use as many colours as you think is appropriate. (LOTS. Lots is appropriate.) When your portrait is finished, grab another free-floating token.

Antagonist Creation

There are some BAD PEOPLE out there. Together, you’re going to create the WORST person: the Antagonist.

Go down the list of things that you and the other characters want. Someone wants the opposite, or at least something mutually exclusive, and they're the ANTAGONIST. If it's not plausible for someone to want the opposite then the Antagonist can be an alliance of people who want things the characters don't want.

Give the Antagonist a name. Do your best to not make it a STUPID one.

The antagonist has a CONNECTION to each character - they’ve burned you in the past. Say what happened last time you met them or their goons, and how you totally got your BUTT handed to you.

The Antagonist is a big deal. They're: 
* personally powerful 
* at the heart of their kick-ass fortress
* surrounded by their dangerous henchpeople. 

Each of these elements functions like a trait: make some notes about the nature of their personal power, their fortress, and their henchpeople, and then one at a time each player should put a token next to two of those. Those tokens are the strength of the Antagonist's resources. Here are some ideas:

* Sick fortress on a DISUSED OIL RIG
* Fleet of attack helicopters
* Pocket full of CORRUPT POLITICIANS
* Powerful wizard
* Mind-control coin
* Growing exponentially larger, day by day
* Infinitely wealthy
* On FIRE, all the time, but doesn’t seem to mind
* Reigns over the JUNGLE on a throne of ivory
* Rainbow Power
* SKY CASTLE YEAH!
* Underground Stronghold
* Etc

WORLD CREATION

This party ain’t gonna kick off in the VOID, it’s time to do some good old-fashioned WORLD-BUILDING. Each player should pick out their two favourite traits. Then, go down this list of questions and answer it in relation to your chosen traits, crossing off questions as you answer them. SCRIBBLE DOWN what you say on a loose piece of paper. If someone’s good at maps, they should DRAW A MAP because MAPS ARE COOL.

(Also, LOOK, not all questions are gonna make sense for all traits, okay? JEEZ, cool yer jets. Pick an appropriate one, or make up a new one, go for it. Also if you want to answer traits for all of your questions, knock yourself out)

(Also also, REINCORPORATE. Which means use and build on stuff that’s come before rather than inventing new stuff all the time. The more you do this, the more the setting will MAKE A SORT OF WEIRD SENSE. Like, say your mate’s like “I learned my DEMON WITH AN ASSAULT RIFLE trait from my unit in ‘Nam,” then you can say “Oh yeah, and I led your unit, which explains my SHOUT UNTIL PEOPLE DO WHAT I SAY trait!”)

* Who taught you how to use this power?

* Where did you learn how to use this power?

* Who hates the fact that you have this power?

* Whose life have you saved with this power?

* Who have you given a terrible scar with this power?

* What have you built with this power?

* Who did you steal this power from?

* Why haven’t you given up your power yet?

* Who was the one person you couldn’t protect with your power?

* How have you upset the Antagonist with this power?

* When you discovered you had this power, where did you run to?

SET THE SCENE

Here’s your mission: get to the Antagonist and stop them from doing ANTAGONIST STUFF. It’s not going to be easy; they’re at the heart of their fortress, surrounded by henchpeople, and pretty tough themselves.

Take it in turns to frame a scene. When you do this, pick TWO CHARACTERS (neither of them have to be yours) and say how they’re in trouble. Everyone else chips in a detail about the scene, whether it’s sight, sound, smell, or feel. (Taste is a weird one, but if you can work it in, MORE POWER TO YOU.)

-BOXOUT: I want more than, or less than, two characters in a scene! Cool, do it, I’m not your mum, you can do what you want - 

Once you’ve got the characters and the trouble down, work out the CONFLICT.

CONFLICT

First of all, you need to boil the conflict down to TWO SIDES and determine WHAT’S AT STAKE. 

The sides are easy: Us versus them. Maximus Rex versus alcoholism. La Saxofina versus an unfriendly audience.

[This system probably works for more sides than two, but I have no idea.]

The stakes are a little harder: work out what each side wants to happen out of the conflict - usually these are the opposite of each other. 

Then look at the non-player element in the conflict, if there is one. What's their threat rating?

Folk				Threat	Will Back Down After...
Just Folk			1	A harsh word.
Bad Folk, Wild Animals	2	A harsh smack in the face.
Elite Bad Folk, Monsters	3	A harsh assault with an axe or bullets.
Maniacs, Natural Disasters	4	Nothing. Only death will stop them.

Come up with 1-3 traits that describe them, too. Each of those traits gets a token, and they have a free-floating token too.

If there are multiple player characters on a side then they each get their own conflict with the enemy, all at the same threat rating and traits.

Resolve each conflict one at a time. How? READ ON FRIEND.

Resolution

1. How much skin do you have in the game? Choose how much harm to risk on a range from 1-4 and that's *your* threat rating. There's still time to run away if you choose a threat of 0 -- the bad guys will get a total win, though.

2. Whose threat rating is the highest? They win, and get what they want!

3. Except...

4. One at a time, the participants in the conflict can seek to gain an advantage. To gain an advantage choose one of your traits and one of the opponent's traits, and explain how you're taking advantage of their trait with yours. If everyone agrees that this makes sense in the context of the fiction then spend a token from the trait you used (or a free-floating one), raise your threat rating by 1, and remove *both* traits from the conflict.

BOXOUT - This is a great time for dialogue, because “I’m going to use my skill at pistols to gain an advantage” is less fun than “Ha HA! I bet you chumpknuckles weren’t expecting me, the Two-Fisted Pistol Ballista, to come a-knockin’ at your door! BANG BANG BANG!”)

4a. Repeat until neither side wants to go again.

4b. If you don't have any applicable traits, you can spend free-floating tokens instead by describing how you take advantage of the environment or some other external advantage or momentary stroke of luck.

4c. Player Characters Only: When someone exploits one of your traits, you gain a free-floating token. Use it to get revenge now, or in a later scene.

4d. Non-player threats -- including the antagonist -- are played by all the players not currently in the conflict.

5. Okay, *now* the one with the highest threat rating wins.

The Antagonist Interferes, And Interfering With The Antagonist

That ANTAGONIST is going to poke their nose in where they’re not wanted. See those tokens you put on their description earlier? Anyone who’s not playing their own character can use those to introduce appropriate elements into the scene.

Here’s the kicker - until the antagonist runs out of tokens, you can’t harm them. They’re totally invulnerable. So it’s a good thing, really, that they’re sending legions of GOONS after you, because you’re just getting CLOSER to your INEVITABLE DRAMATIC SHOWDOWN.

WINNING

If the conflict ends in a draw then EVERYONE loses. (Great job, EVERYONE.) Neither side gets what they want. NPCs retreat and player characters check off the next box on their harm track.

If one side wins by 1 then they get what they want, but the losing side can add a 'yes, but' condition. It can't *negate* the victory, but it can colour it.

If one side wins by 2 or more then they stormed the opposition and not only get what they want, but with a little BONUS attached - a ‘yes, and.’ 

Harm As Established

In any given conflict, harm can stem from being the loser when what the winner wants is 'your death' or something similar, or from being the winner when the loser chooses their condition to be that you get hurt.

A player character receives only the amount of harm that they risked. Non-player characters suffer an appropriate amount of harm for the nature of the contest.

Transformed

When a character fills in the Transformed box then their loss has left a significant impact on them: maybe they died and came back as a vampire, maybe they were so convinced that they've joined a religion, maybe the savagery of the world has blasted all morality from them, etc.

The upshot is that you must choose at least two of your traits and rewrite them into new traits. Any tokens on the changed traits should be more or less evenly divided among the new ones.

On the plus side, going through the transformation for the first time restores all your harm boxes to empty. The second time, you don’t transform; just treat it as a normal harm box.

Destroyed

When you fill in the Destroyed box, that's it for that character. They're either dead, or they've been owned so hard they just give up on the spot and retire to a farm in the country, where they live out the rest of their days with the bitter memory of such a crushing defeat.

On the plus side, your new character has all their harm boxes empty!

Collateral

A player character in a conflict can choose to reduce the harm they take by 1 by explaining how something precious is destroyed, lost, used up or otherwise ruined in their place.

The By The Skin of Your Teeth Rule
If someone describes an action in a conflict which makes the other players applaud, sit around in open-mouthed silence, fall about laughing, go *WHAT?* in stunned disbelief, or otherwise express their admiration for the escalation of the story to the NEXT LEVEL, then that action is protected from the worst extremes of failure. Even if you lose HARDCORE, you still get to set a condition as if you only lost by 1.